Chuck McCullagh's views from Manhattan on magazine and publishing technology.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

The Changing Face of Media Brands

Having spent almost thirty years in the media business, I
feel some sadness when once-marquee brands are passed around the investment
community like an unwanted Christmas pudding. I’ve had many friends at Newsweek and have had occasion to visit a number of their
international editions. In some respects,
the magazine seems now to have more cachet outside the country than in—but not
by much.

Though I had no inside information, I never had much
confidence in the Daily Beast/Newsweek marriage. The editor, Tina Brown, seemed to be still
paying too much attention to the “buzz” factor, which was the operative word
that described her failed Talk
magazine. I joined Hachette just in time
to review the Talk business plan that
Ms. Brown was shopping. As an investment
vehicle the plan made little sense to me, so I recommended Hachette pass, which
they did. Hearst and Miramax stepped in
and funded the short, unhappy life of Talk.

This closure of Talk
got outsized attention because of Ms. Brown’s celebrity and her successes at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Even though by Talk’s launch in 1999 digital was decidedly in the air, most
publishers considered it a curiosity and not seismic disruptor. David Carr wrote in The New York Times on the tenth anniversary of the launch part that
the “Talk party was the end of an
era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with
cash from the go-go ‘90s and engorged by spending from the dot com era,
mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something
extraordinary. But the brink ended up
being a cliff.” Ms. Brown recalled, “It
seemed like that happened in the 18th century.”

Newsweek has been
sold to International Business Times for an undisclosed sum that was likely
pocket change. IBT is a digital media
company with 200 employees. Christianity Today and The New York Observer have linked IBT to
controversial Korean Christian preacher David Jang, who has been hailed by his
followers as the Second Coming Christ.

On the heels of the Newsweek
sale came the announcement that The
Boston Globe had been sold for $70 million to the owner of the Boston Red
Sox and The Washington Post was sold
to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in a personal transaction for $250 million. You can do the math. The New York Times purchased The Boston Globe in 1993 for $1.1
billion. The Washington Post was worth more than that a decade ago.

James Fallows at The
Atlantic online captured the moment, describing the Newsweek sale as a tremor and the Washington Post sale as an earthquake. Understandably, there is a great deal of
nostalgia around this transaction. Perhaps The
Post had its finest hour forty-two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled
for the paper and the publication of the Pentagon Papers changed the course of
American history. More recently, of
course, The Post, along with The Guardian, published a trove of NSA
documents.

That said, The Post
was failing as a business—it reportedly lost $50 million in the first half of 2013.
For
all of its journalistic “firsts,” The
Post has become something of the company paper in the company town of
Washington, DC. Please read Frank Rich’s
article, “The Stench of the Potomac” in the current issue of New York Magazine for his acerbic take
on the media’s role in cultivating a political plutocracy where the dominant
color is green, as in greenback. Rich takes some of the wind out of the
nostalgia sails.

Naturally, there’s a lot of chatter about Bezos’ purchase of
The Post, with some claiming that this
is a personal philanthropic move and others suggesting that this is a way to
get in the middle of the Washington discussion about taxes, patents, and
anti-trust, and monopolistic practices. Henry Blodget, CEO of The Business Insider, where Bezos is also an investor, suggests
that this is a straight business move, even though the transaction is separate
from Amazon. But the business model is
implicitly there. After all, Amazon is
in the content production and distribution business. It’s also in the subscription business with
the Amazon Prime offering. And Amazon is
in a position to do what few companies have managed to do at scale: integrate content and e-commerce. There is every reason to think that The Post will have a robust digital
future.

When I learned that Newsweek
had been sold yet again, I reminded myself that magazines and newspapers of all
stripes have been coming and going for a hundred years or more and the pace of
this change has only been speeded up by digital disruption. Tastes, psychologies, cultural fixes,
collectibles, entertainment, vicissitudes, and the-next-big-thing change and
change again. Most magazines don’t live
long enough to become brands.

George Magazine,
with John F. Kennedy on the masthead as publisher, should have been a sure
thing, positioned as the intersection of politics and celebrity. I joined Hachette after the publisher became
a partner with Kennedy. I found the
editorial soft and mushy and could not identify the business rationale. Hachette tried to keep it going after Kennedy’s
tragic death, but was forced to shut it down in 2001. The French fantasy about Camelot kept the
magazine going longer than it should have.

Sometimes a magazine’s market position and reason-for-being
simply changes or disappears. Mademoiselle, launched in 1935, was a
classy title that couldn’t shift its editorial enough to match the changing
sensibility of a new generation of readers. It also closed in 2001.

Or magazines just run their course, as was the case with McCall’s magazine, launched in 1873. Some of America’s greatest writers, including
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, wrote for the title. Changing
the title to Rosie in 2000, with a
very loud Rosie O’Donnell as editorial director, didn’t help and it was
shuttered in 2002. The women’s category, long-called the Seven
Sisters, has suffered the most disruption.

Prodded by the Newsweek
story, I looked at hundreds of magazines that have closed in the US in the last
few decades. In a way this period was a
wonderful time for magazine launches. The
economy was good, especially in the 1990's. Consumers were becoming much more interested
in special-interest magazines that focused on sports, crafts, and hobbies. “Zines” were all the rage. And print advertising was strong. So why not The
Glam Eye that focused on the music scene around Toledo, Ohio; New York Dog that was designed to sit
alongside Vogue and Cosmopolitan on the newsstand; Psychoanalysis, a comic book that
featured three patients in analysis; Sassy,
a teen magazine focused on sex, love, and rock & roll; Syrian World, about that country’s high culture; and Greed Magazine, another way to consume
music. Those were the good old days.

Even if the Second Coming Christ is not a secret investor in
the business, Newsweek is probably
better off with IBF, even though this digital-only company is reportedly
flirting with the idea of a print edition of the magazine. Likewise,
The Washington Post will surely be
much better off with Bezos at the helm.

I don’t know how much we should infer from the fact that The Washington Post owned Newsweek from 1961 to 2010, selling to
stereo equipment magnate Sidney Harmon for $1 and some liabilities. He then entered a JV with IAC; thus the
short-lived marriage with The Daily Beast.

At the very least, it was time for new money, new management
and new thinking to enter this game of brands.